Mulberry has named Christopher Kane creative director of womenswear. First collection due in September. A Scottish designer who graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2006, lost his own label in 2023, and arrives at Somerset’s most famous leather house with a career’s worth of ideas and nowhere left to put them except into the work.
Kane’s CSM graduation collection still gets referenced: neon-bandage dresses, confrontational and precise. Within three years he was designing Versace’s Versus line. By 2013 Kering had acquired a majority stake. He was thirty-one.
Then the more familiar sequence. He bought back his label in 2018, closed Mount Street in 2020, shuttered the brand entirely in 2023. The clothes were never the problem. The economics of independent design were.
Mulberry
Founded in 1971. Rooted in English leather craft. The Bayswater, the Alexa. Bags that became cultural shorthand for a particular kind of quiet luxury. The house has spent years looking for the right creative direction, uncertain of its own temperature. Under CEO Andrea Baldo, the restructuring has been disciplined and largely unreported.
The Somerset factory, where much of the leather goods are still produced, remains one of the few luxury manufacturing facilities of its scale on British soil. The supply chain is short and the provenance is genuine. What it needed was a designer who could make the product feel urgent.
The clothes were never the problem. The economics of independent design were.
Margaux DelacroixKane makes clothes that reward a second look. Ideas you discover after wearing them for a week. That quality, applied to a house with Mulberry’s manufacturing depth, could produce something distinctive in a season where distinction is scarce.
September
First collection in September. Product in stores by January 2027. The timeline is brisk, which suggests he has been thinking about this role for longer than the announcement implies.
The question is what he does with accessories. His appointment is specifically for womenswear, but any creative director who inherits the Bayswater will inevitably reshape how those objects are presented and understood. The relationship between the clothes and the bags will say a great deal.
Christopher Kane
London
The city has spent years watching its most talented designers leave for Paris or Milan. Kane’s appointment reverses that. One of the most inventive designers of his generation, inside a British house, working with British manufacturing.
His time at his own label gave him fluency. Mulberry gives him resources, scale, and a heritage worth interpreting. September will be watched closely. The industry wants this to work, and for once the reasons are practical rather than sentimental.